Earlier this month, Postbank failed to pay social grant recipients on time after its system malfunctioned, resulting in pensioners and those living with disabilities being unable to access their money for over a week. The technical glitch led to recipients receiving “transaction incomplete errors” because of the system’s communication timeouts.
While the South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) and Postbank promised social grants would be accessible to beneficiaries by now, thousands are still without the much-needed source of income three weeks later.
Whats the reasoning behind the glitches?
Last week, Communications Minister Mondli Gungubele said the new payment switch meant money from failed transactions was erroneously deducted from beneficiaries' accounts, affecting 600,000 people.
We acknowledge the financial and logistical inconvenience that the system failure has caused to the millions of our people who depend solely on social grants for survival. We profusely apologise to those affected as we are aware of the grave inconvenience this has caused. We want to assure the public that government is committed to continuously improving our systems to provide a reliable service.
During the occurrence of technical challenges, grant funds were not automatically reserved in the bank accounts of individuals attempting withdrawals. To rectify this, Postbank has initiated the process of manually reversing these funds into the bank accounts of affected grant beneficiaries.
However, the manual reversal of grant funds is a timely process and therefore some grant beneficiaries have not yet received their grant money, The reversal process commenced last week and remains ongoing.
According to Postbank around 90% of the 600,000 people have been paid their grants.
Will this happen again next month?
Human rights organisation Black Sash says that the DSD along with SASSA must deliver a plan to mitigate further technical issues and has said, "We are disappointed that neither the minister nor the respective CEOs failed to outline any plan or measures by Sassa and Postbank to prevent similar events from happening again."
The group stressed that there was also no mention of how government will mitigate the impact any future system failures will have on beneficiaries.
We are alarmed and dismayed by these comments. Not only does it demonstrate that our own government does not grasp the seriousness these system failures have on the most vulnerable, the elderly, who are the poorest in our communities. It shows that beneficiaries must just accept that there will be delays in accessing their grant monies.
Black Sash spokesperson Angie Richardson says this is the fourth major ‘major technical glitch’ Postbank has encountered since last year affecting thousands of beneficiaries.
“It’s not about Sassa having to step in, they have a constitutional mandate to manage these kind of processes and the challenge has been since the Postbank took over the payments from the SAPO last year in September, payment challenges have persisted.”
As Postbank is unable to give a 100% guarantee that system failures will not happen again, Black Sash has urged Sassa and Postbank to share what the plan is should it happen again, and what beneficiaries should do.
The group also noted that they want to see that the Master Service Agreement (MSA) between Sassa and Postbank must be finalised and signed, as this is an important mechanism needed to hold both properly accountable, especially if further technical challenges can be expected.
Sassa ‘working tirelessly’ to sort out the non-payment
Meanwhile, the Department of Social Development Minister, Lindiwe Zulu confirmed that roughly 60,000 people who have yet to be paid.
Zulu, says that her department along with Sassa is working around the clock ensure these grant recipients get paid. The minister also noted that the South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) cares about recipients.
